Mistakes to Avoid When Planning a Digital Marketing Campaign

In this era of immense competition, digital media is playing a crucial role in the corporate world.

Research shows that 64% of people use social media channels to find inspiration for shopping. Thus, designing a top-notch digital marketing campaign is essential for both newly emerging and well-established brands.

Even the best marketing connoisseurs can sometimes derail the entire campaign by making seemingly harmless mistakes that don’t go down too well with their target audience.

The internet never forgets. When digital marketing goes awry, your brand is tried in the court of public opinion. IHOP made such a mistake when they compared their product to breasts! Needless to say, Twitter exploded.

The Twitterati was so outraged, IHOP had to issue an apology.

While digital marketing provides endless opportunities to grow, companies need to treat it carefully, as their reputation is at stake.

With the boom of digital media channels, online marketers need to know the pitfalls of implementing ineffective, or worse, shoddy campaigns.

Many businesses have faced great losses due to this carelessness. Therefore, we are sharing 7 mistakes that companies must avoid when planning their digital marketing campaigns.

1. Allowing the boss to set your company’s digital marketing strategy

Bosses are not always right. The boss can be anyone, an investor who is waiting for his returns, a CEO who is focused on increasing sales and cutting costs, or a manager who wants to show commendable performance to the top level management.

All these bosses are only interested in making money. Their sole aim is to get maximum returns and nothing else. But as a digital marketer, your aim is to get maximum returns while keeping all other strings attached, like branding, audience expectation and long term goals.

As a digital marketer, you must not let them ruin your digital marketing campaign. Do your research and prove the effectiveness of your ideas with data, instead of gut feelings.

Some marketers are of the view that their brand is for everyone. However, this approach is wrong. A good example here is Crystal Pepsi. This cola did not contain caffeine. But they also did not study their target market well. Since people weren’t as health-conscious and aware as they are today, Crystal Pepsi failed to create the impact that they had hoped for.

Every brand has a target audience and understanding this segment is essential for crafting a campaign that nails it. Dove declares that beauty is for every woman. It targets women of all ages and says that there is no age limit to enhance a woman’s beauty. Put simply, Dove understands the psyche of their target audience, and owes the success of their campaigns to this understanding.

If you are a new brand planning to add some explainer videos about your product, understanding the pain points of your target audience will inevitably help you create work that speaks directly to them.

A good example is the Dollar Shave Club that came up with attention-grabbing videos and created a billion dollar business in less than 6 years. The new player grabbed a big share of men’s razor market, and most of the credit goes to their intelligent digital marketing campaigns.

Products have to be innovated as per the market needs and the taste of people and all of it is only possible with thorough research about a target audience.

Let’s say you have a very innovative and interesting campaign on a particular social media channel but you aren’t getting as many followers or discussions as you had expected. You keep pouring resources into the campaign only to realize later that your target audience is active on a different social media channel. Thus, you’ve squandered your resources.

This is why understanding your target market is the foundation on which you can build a solid brand and reputation.

3. Ignoring data

Charts and reports might look dull but they can do wonders for your business. Every social media channel like Twitter, Facebook and Instagram provides comprehensive analytics whenever someone engages, interacts, likes, or dislikes your page.

You can even get data on your profile visits or the viewers of your recently shared video. These numbers are of immense importance. For instance, you will be able to see which age group or which nationality is most engaged with your videos.

Similarly, the number of shares can tell which videos are most liked by people. This data helps many companies revise their marketing strategies to be more impactful.

These analytics also guide your future marketing strategies.

4. Ignoring technical SEO aspects

One cannot stick to old school SEO principles such as spamming through guest blogging and keyword stuffing. Since Google is changing its policies, we need to keep a keen eye on our SEO strategies. What matters the most is offering quality to our audience.

The number of backlinks or the number of likes and followers will not make a big difference if you are not using a smart strategy. Fake likes and links from PBN might give you short-term results.

By creating content that is meaningful to your audience, and also search engine-friendly, you will notice a growing trend in your interactions with the customers.

Similarly, if you are guest blogging only to generate links, and your articles are not providing quality information to readers, soon enough they will be flagged as spam by search engines.

Semantic SEO should also be kept in mind as Google is now becoming a platform where we cannot just discover information but we can order it, too. If you overlook these technical aspects of SEO, you are making a big mistake!

Video marketing is a great option, but remember that a video should not take too long to load otherwise customers won’t think twice and leave.

These days, animated marketing videos are widely used by various brands and these videos are generating great traffic. This animated video called ‘The Scarecrow’ by Chipotle Mexican Grill was viewed millions of times on the internet and was hailed as innovative marketing and a beautiful piece of art.

5. Using social media for conversions

Gone are the days when people used social media for conversions. This practice only provides short-term results.

The main purpose of being active on social media channels is to get feedback from clients to improve your product or service, and build and maintain close relationships with existing and potential customers.

One cannot answer all queries in detail if the basic aim is conversion rather than relationship building. Social media channels are a great platform for taking reviews from clients. Brands like Nike, Adidas and many others have built a strong customer relationship by being active on social media.

On the other hand, social media gives an opportunity to potential customers to read reviews of former clients and develop trust. In addition to this, a social media platform is also used for increasing connectivity among clients. Here are some ideas on gathering more testimonials.

6. Not scaling campaigns and channels

Scaling is of utmost important when it comes to designing a digital marketing campaign. When resources are limited, we need to maximize the output in a smarter way.

For instance, if the budget is low and a company’s target audience is mostly active on Facebook, they should direct a part of their marketing resources to creating content that resonates with a Facebook audience.

7. Running organic and paid parts separately

Whether we are talking about organic or paid channels, both of them are important. But, it also depends on the nature of your business. If you’re running a social service, organic will play a vital role because users will have a hard time trusting you through a paid advertisement for community development.

In a digital marketing campaign for a company, one needs to align both organic and paid aspects of the campaign to get maximum results.

If your organic results are awesome and you are not active in paid ads, it is likely that your business won’t show on Google’s top searches. Google is now showing ads in the top 2-3 searches.

This means one cannot stick to just organic if you want greater visibility for your business. A quick search for social media management software on Google shows this:

On the other hand, having only paid ads with no presence in the SERPs is also a big drawback because most people won’t rely on paid ads, particularly if they aren’t already aware of your brand or product.

In short, digital marketing campaigns are the lifeblood of brands. A few factors such as scaling campaigns, conducting thorough researches, using analytics, keeping expectations realistic and using the latest technology are sure to give the results you need.

As we assessed different digital marketing campaigns, we found mistakes mentioned in this article to be common in most of them.

Note: The opinions expressed in this article are the views of the author, and not necessarily the views of Caphyon, its staff, or its partners.

Author: Thrive Internet Marketing

Thrive Internet Marketing: a full-service online marketing company offering web design, digital advertising, SEO, social media marketing, and more. Since 2005, our team has been delivering massive and sustainable sales growth to all types of businesses across North America. Thrive is passionate about using the power of the Internet to grow any business.
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13 thoughts on “Mistakes to Avoid When Planning a Digital Marketing Campaign”

Some very good points here. I think understand the target audience really is critical. There are many agencies that put together a ‘one size fits all’ campaign. They get to know a few social platforms that they like and they completely ignore what platforms the audience of their client uses. Consider for example how different Snapchat users are to LinkedIn for instance.

Digital marketing and digital media are playing a crucial role in the marketing campaign. Therefore, as a business man, I am always looking for different types of digital media strategies to grow my business venture. In the beginning, we are committing mistakes while planning digital marketing which includes targeting customers, market structure, and many others. Here this article also describes some important facts about how to avoid mistakes when planning for the digital marketing campaign. Thanks for such a wonderful overview.

Some great points here, I find a lot of businesses these days want to up their social media presence but sometimes social media isn’t the right fit. No one wants to see accountants on Facebook but being found in Google is by far the best option, so it really comes down to what is the right fit for the client and their business in order to get the best results from the right marketing campaign.

Haha I love the point about having the boss set up the company’s digital marketing strategy, I see it time after time, they tell me we set up a facebook and built a website and that is it and then wonder why they are not generating any new leads. I then go on to explain all the missing pieces required. Maybe next time I will just send them to this page;)

Great article, I was literally laughing at the intro about Ihop. Even the big guys make embarrassing mistakes. Jokes aside, understanding your target audience is key to the success of every marketing campaign. I also think your thoughts on SEO and videos are brilliant. Further, social media should be used as a way to communicate with current and potential new customers and obtaining feedback on your products or services. Nicely done. Thanks

Any strategy which is designed for short term results is most likely going to backfire. In my experience, to get long lasting results it requires a well thought action plan, hard work, and continuous testing with trial and error to get just right over time. Thanks for the great insights. Look forward to following your blog and reading more of your posts.

Yes point one can be a bit of a dance depending on the type of “Boss” you are dealing with. It is so important to frame things clearly right at the start of any contract. Some clients are actually very knowledgable about their customers. Some, however, have some misinformation about the effectiveness of certain marketing strategies. I like to get a feel for this right at the start, and if it seems that the potential client wants to micro-manage the project I might consider whether moving forward with them is worth the additional time that an individual like this sometimes demands.

Awesome! Point number 4 stood out for me. SEO technicality must never be left out of place. Providing quality content and a very fast responsive platform will go a long way to get more ranking. Thank you.

Digital Marketing is playing a key role to grow a successful online business. As a digital marketer, I think, we should keep in mind these points for making a successful campaign. Thanks for your alarming post to avoid such kind of mistakes.